Top 40 John Barth Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The story of your life is not your life; it’s your story.”

— John Barth

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

2. “The Bible is not man’s word about God, but God’s word about man.”

— John Barth

3. “In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.”

— John Barth

4. “All men are loyal, but their objects of allegiance are at best approximate.”

— John Barth

5. “On our planet, sir, males and females copulate. Moreover, they enjoy copulating. But for various reasons they cannot do this whenever, wherever, and with whomever they choose. Hence all this running around that you observe. Hence the world.”

— John Barth

6. “Nothing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people.”

— John Barth

7. “Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.”

— John Barth

8. “Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.”

— John Barth

9. “Intellectual discussion, after all, is the real joy of the winter of life, when other pleasures have flown, as it were.”

— John Barth

10. “The horror of our history has purged me of opinions.”

— John Barth

11. “Finally you begin to make your mistakes on the highest level-let’s say the upper slopes of slippery Parnassus-and it’s at that point you need coaching.”

— John Barth

12. “Self knowledge is always bad news.”

— John Barth

13. “Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back.”

— John Barth

14. “He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he’s not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator – though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed.”

— John Barth

15. “More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.”

— John Barth

16. “It is often pleasant to stone a martyr, no matter how much we may admire him.”

— John Barth

17. “You’re probably wasting time on things like eating and sleeping. Cease that, and read all of philosophy and all of literature. Also art. Plus politics and a few other things. The history of everything.”

— John Barth

18. “I admire writers who can make complicated things simple, but my own talent has been to make simple things complicated.”

— John Barth

19. “Yet everyone begins in the same place; how is it that most go along without difficulty but a few lose their way?”

— John Barth

20. “Innocence is like youth,′ he declared sadly, ’which is given to us only to expend and takes its very meaning from its loss.”

— John Barth

21. “Though life’s tuition is always ruinous, inexorably we learn.”

— John Barth

22. “One of the things I miss about teaching is that students would tell me what I ought to read. One of my students, back in the 1960s, put me onto Borges, and I remember another mentioning Flann O’Brien’s At Swim Two-Birds in the same way.”

— John Barth

23. “If you are a novelist of a certain type of termperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn’t too bad a novelist except he was a Realist.”

— John Barth

24. “I particularly scorn my fondness for paradox. I despise pessimism, narcissism, solipsism, truculence, word-play, and pusillanimity, my chiefer inclinations; loathe self-loathers ergo me; have no pity for self-pity and so am free of that sweet baseness. I doubt I am. Being me’s no joke.”

— John Barth

25. “Every artist joins a conversation that’s been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.”

— John Barth

26. “Others live for the lie of love; Echo lives for her lovely lies, loves for their livening.”

— John Barth

27. “What a sentence, everything was wrong from the outset.”

— John Barth

28. “To realize that nothing makes any final difference is overwhelming; but if one goes no farther and becomes a saint, a cynic or a suicide on principle, one hasn’t reasoned completely. The truth is that nothing makes any difference, including that truth. Hamlet’s question is, absolutely, meaningless.”

— John Barth

29. “So, I begin each day with a gesture of cynicism, and close it with a gesture of faith; or, if you prefer, begin it by reminding myself that, for me at least, goals and objectives are without value, and close it by demonstrating that the fact is irrelevant. A gesture of temporality, a gesture of eternity. It is in the tension between these two gestures that I have lived my adult life.”

— John Barth

30. “Nobody knew how to be what they were right.”

— John Barth

31. “The first obligation of the writer is to be interesting. To be interesting; not to change the world.”

— John Barth

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

32. “Somewhere in the world there was a young woman with such splendid understanding that she’d see him entire, like a poem or story, and find his words so valuable after all that when he confessed his apprehensions she would explain why they were in fact the very things that made him precious to her... and to Western Civilization! There was no such girl, the simple truth being.”

— John Barth

33. “The nightsea journey may be absurd, but here we swim, will-we nill-we, against the flood, onward and upward, toward a shore that may not exist and couldn’t be reached if it did.”

— John Barth

34. “A curious thing about written literature: It is about four thousand years old, but we have no way of knowing whether four thousand years constitutes senility or the maiden blush of youth.”

— John Barth

35. “Love it is that drives and sustains us!′ I translate: we don’t know what drives and sustains us, only that we are most miserably driven and, imperfectly, sustained. Love is how we call our ignorance of what whips us.”

— John Barth

36. “Tis e’er the lot of the innocent in the world, to fly to the wolf for succor from the lion.”

— John Barth

37. “What I’ve learned is that the muses’ decision to sing or not to sing is not based on the elevation of your moral purpose – they will sing or not, regardless.”

— John Barth

38. “Tis e’er the wont of simple folk to prize the deed and o’erlook the motive, and of learned folk to discount the deed and lay open the soul of the doer.”

— John Barth

39. “It’s easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.”

— John Barth

40. “Nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes.”

— John Barth

41. “I don’t see how anybody starts a novel without knowing how it’s going to end. I usually make detailed outlines: how many chapters it will be and so forth.”

— John Barth

42. “History – an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant.”

— John Barth

43. “The transaction will enable us to become a single source of integrated products and services that building owners want in order to optimize comfort and energy efficiency.”

— John Barth

44. “It’s not difficult to be encyclopedic in a work of fiction; it’s damned difficult to be encyclopedic, I suppose, in truth.”

— John Barth

45. “That clever folk care less for what ye think than why ye think it.”

— John Barth

46. “If you would learn a thing, straightway declare yourself a professor of it!”

— John Barth

47. “When you’re lost, the smartest thing to do is stay put till you’re found, hollering if necessary.”

— John Barth

48. “I hope I’m a fiction without real hope.”

— John Barth